. Peter Arnett

Peter Gregg Arnett, ONZM (born November 13, 1934, Riverton, New Zealand) is a New Zealand-American journalist.Arnett worked for National Geographic magazine, and later for various television networks, most notably CNN. He is well known for his coverage of war, including the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. He was awarded the 1966 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for his work in Vietnam, where he was present from 1962 to 1975, most of the time reporting for the Associated Press news agency. In 1994, Arnett wrote Live from the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 Years in the World's War Zones. In March 1997, Arnett was able to interview Osama bin Laden. The Journalism School at the Southern Institute of Technology is named after him. Some of Arnett's early days in journalism were in Southeast Asia, particularly Bangkok. He started out running a small English-language newspaper in Laos in 1960. Eventually, he made his way to Vietnam where he was a reporter for the Associated Press. He worked with other AP staff in their Saigon office writing a number of important articles, such as "Death of Supply Column 21", which attracted the ire of the American government. In July 1963, he was punched in the nose by South Vietnamese undercover police while covering Buddhist protests.He went on dozens of missions with troops, including during the traumatic battle of Hill 875, in which a detachment went to try to rescue another unit of soldiers that was stranded in hostile territory. They themselves were nearly killed during the rescue. In September 1972 he accompanied a group of U.S. peace activists, including William Sloane Coffin and David Dellinger, to Hanoi, North Vietnam to bring three prisoners of war back to the United States.Arnett got into trouble for writing in an unvarnished manner when trying to report the stories of ordinary soldiers and civilians. Arnett's writing often was perceived as negative. General William Westmoreland and president Lyndon B. Johnson and other people in power had battles with the AP over trying to get Arnett removed from his assignment.Arnett's most famous act of reporting from the Vietnam War was a story published on February 7, 1968, about the provincial capital Bến Tre: "'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,' a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong." The quotation was distorted in subsequent publications, eventually becoming the more familiar, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." The accuracy of the original quotation and its source has often been called into question. Arnett never revealed his source, except to say that it was one of four officers he interviewed that day. US Army major Phil Cannella, the senior officer present at Bến Tre, suggested that the quotation might have been a distortion of something he said to Arnett. The New Republic at the time attributed the quotation to US Air Force major Chester L. Brown. In Walter Cronkite's 1971 book, Eye on the World, Arnett reasserted that the quotation was something "one American major said to me in a moment of revelation."

Arnett was one of the last reporters in Saigon after its capture by the North Vietnamese Army, and met with NVA soldiers who showed him how they had come into the city. Arnett was the writer of the 1980 mini-series documentary - Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War.Following the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, Arnett was working for Parade and entered Afghanistan with Mujahideen guides illegally from Pakistan, while dressed as natives. They continued on to a Jalalabad hideaway of approximately fifty rebels. The trip came to an end when Healy fell into the Kunar river, ruining the pair's cameras. Later, Arnett would recount the story to Artyom Borovik who was covering the Soviet side of the war. Arnett worked for CNN for 18 years ending in 1999. During the Gulf War he became a household name worldwide when he became the only reporter with live coverage directly from Baghdad. His dramatic reports were often given with air raid sirens blaring and the sound of Baghdad bomb explosions in the background. Together with two other CNN journalists, Bernard Shaw and John Holliman, Arnett brought continuous coverage from Baghdad for the 16 initial intense hours of the war (January 17, 1991). Although 40 foreign journalists were present at the Al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad at the time, only CNN possessed the means to communicate to the outside world. Soon the other journalists left Iraq, including the two CNN colleagues, which left Arnett as the sole reporter remaining there.His reports on civilian damage caused by the bombing were not received well by the coalition war administration, who by their constant use of terms like "smart bombs" and "surgical precision" had tried to project an image that civilian casualties would be at a minimum. White House sources would later state that Arnett was being used as a tool for Iraqi disinformation and CNN received a letter from 34 Members of the United States Congress accusing Arnett of "unpatriotic journalism".Two weeks into the war, Arnett was able to obtain an uncensored interview with Saddam Hussein. The Gulf War became the first war to be seen truly live on TV, and Arnett was in many ways the sole player reporting from the "other side" for a period of five weeks.About halfway through the war the CIA approached Mr. Arnett. They believed that the Iraqi military was operating a high-level communication network from the basement of the Al Rashid Hotel, which is where Mr. Arnett and a few others from CNN were staying. The CIA wanted him out so the Air Force could bomb the hotel, but Mr. Arnett refused. He said he had been given a tour of the hotel and denied there was such a facility.

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Laatst bijgewerkt op 17 januari 2012.

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